The Assholes In Charge

Wilbur Ross may be the swampiest of the Swamp Thangs.

Dan Alexander, Forbes:

It is difficult to imagine the possibility that a man like Ross, who Forbes estimates is worth some $700 million, might steal a few million from one of his business partners. Unless you have heard enough stories about Ross. Two former WL Ross colleagues remember the commerce secretary taking handfuls of Sweet’N Low packets from a nearby restaurant, so he didn’t have to go out and buy some for himself. One says workers at his house in the Hamptons used to call the office, claiming Ross had not paid them for their work. Another two people said Ross once pledged $1 million to a charity, then never paid. A commerce official called the tales “petty nonsense,” and added that Ross does not put sweetener in his coffee.

There are bigger allegations. Over several months, in speaking with 21 people who know Ross, Forbes uncovered a pattern: Many of those who worked directly with him claim that Ross wrongly siphoned or outright stole a few million here and a few million there, huge amounts for most but not necessarily for the commerce secretary. At least if you consider them individually. But all told, these allegations—which sparked lawsuits, reimbursements and an SEC fine—come to more than $120 million. If even half of the accusations are legitimate, the current United States secretary of commerce could rank among the biggest grifters in American history.

- and -

Those who’ve done business with Ross generally tell a consistent story, of a man obsessed with money and untethered to facts. “He’ll push the edge of truthfulness and use whatever power he has to grab assets,” says New York financier Asher Edelman. One of Ross’ former colleagues is more direct: “He’s a pathological liar.”

Wilbur Ross is on the Cult45 payroll because Wilbur Ross is a kindred spirit - crooked like a mountain road.

One more time - say it with me now: This is not an administration; this is a fucking robbery.

That Guy We Never Hear About

Bob Mercer's ridiculous attitudes* are everywhere you look when you get way out there to  Wingnutopia. Watch out for that guy.

Charlie Pierce points up a few things we need to keep in mind:

If you accept, as Joshua Green argues in his splendid Devil's Bargain, and as events subsequent to the election have more than borne out, without Steve Bannon, it is unlikely that we would have a President* Trump to be embarrassed by in front of the entire 21st Century. And what is also clear is that, without Robert and Rebekah Mercer, the reactionary New York gozillionnaires, Bannon would be back on Giedi Prime with the rest of the Harkonnens. 

At the moment, Robert Mercer is being sued by his former partner in Renaissance Technologies, a guy named David Magerman, who is not quite as enthusiastic about the Trump presidency* as the Mercers are. Documents are becoming public and, as Vanity Fair reports, some of those documents are well off the boy-howdy scale of revelatory.

You don't get Trump without Bannon, and you don't get Bannon without Bob and Rebekah Mercer.

*as lined out in Charlie's piece:

a) The United States began to go in the wrong direction after the passage of the Civl Rights Act in the 1960s

b) African Americans were doing fine in the late-1950s and early-1960s before the Civil Rights Act

c) The Civil Rights Act “infantilized” African Americas by making them dependent on government and removing any incentive to work

d) The only racist people remaining in the United States are black

e) White people have no racial animus toward African Americans anymore, and if there is any, it's not something that the government should be concerned with

Brain Wave Deficit

Another entitled-feeling over-privileged tin-eared dolt responding defensively to criticism:

Coupla counter-questions here, ma'am:

1) You don't really think you're supporting the system all by yourself, right?

2) How much more than anybody else are you benefiting from that system?

Fuck me - ignorant rich people. It's like they have no idea how these things actually work.

Hey Hey - Goo-ood Bye

WaPo, Ashley Parker, Philip Rucker, Robert Costa and Damian Paletta

“No matter what happens, Steve is a honey badger,” said this person, who like others interviewed spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the situation. “Steve’s in a good place. He doesn’t care. He’s going to support the president and push the agenda, whether he’s on the inside or the outside.”

Bannon doesn't care.

First off, he knows he's insulated. He doesn't have to worry about the effects of shitty draconian policies on regular people cuz he's not regular people.

Guys at Bannon's level pretty much think they own the government anyway (or at least they think they should - 'course we haven't exactly been giving them whole big bunches of reasons to think otherwise). And there's always the probability that he just enjoys having the power, and the time, to dabble.

Wanting to prevent ridiculously rich and craven people from "governing" at their leisurely  whim was kinda the whole point of 'The United States of America' in first place, wasn't it?

So lemme see - what might keep these assholes kinda reined in so they'd hafta spend more time minding their own goddamned business and less time fucking with the rest of us?

Anybody wanna talk Tax Reform?  Be ready - cuz that's coming soon, but for now:

It Gets Worse

As if the fuckery of cult45* isn't bad enough - and I've mentioned this shit before - we have to keep one good eye on what the Congress Weasels are up to that we don't get to see very well because the 45*/Russia thing is such a very useful smoke screen.

Fuck up healthcare coverage
Fuck up the water and the air and the food
And make prescription medications too expensive for most anybody not living 3000% over the fucking poverty line
And
And
And
And privatize the fuck outa everything that moves or doesn't move; or might evolve into a moving thing sometime down the road (not that any of the dumbass rubes will even guess what that "evolving" thing might mean because they keep electing Coin-Operated Politicians who think Betsy DeVos is the new Moritmer Fucking Adler) - and by the way, let's create a Futures Market so somebody can own every-goddamned-thing there is or ever will be. 

And let's not forget Net Neutrality.

Trae Crowder:

Goin' Back

The Atlantic:

Recently, 43 disabled protesters were arrested outside of Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell's office, and the clips went viral on social media. Since then, activists have kept up the pressure on the Republican health bill with similar actions across the country. For this short documentary, The Atlantic traveled to the heart of the disability rights movement in the San Francisco Bay Area to learn why some people with disabilities fear the Republican health plan. Mary Lou Breslin of the Disability Rights Education and Defense Fund says cuts to Medicaid could ultimately cost 3 million people with disabilities their freedom, and erode "40 years of hard won gains by the disability rights movement."

This documentary was produced as a project for the USC Center for Health Journalism's California Fellowship.

Taking an axe to Medicaid will prob'ly not leave all of these folks without some kind of coverage - it will just make sure that the Rent-Seekers and Profit-Takers will collect even more tax dollars than they're getting now.

The GOP is using that reliable scare-word, "Socialism", so they can change Medicaid to something that's more lucrative for their buddies and their in-laws.  Which equates to an effort to morph the thing into "Socializing Cost in order to generate Private Profit".

It's weird because the guys who're always bitching about the incompetence and inefficiency of Da Gubmint are the ones who're taking one of the very few federal programs that is actually cost-effective, and making it grossly inefficient by trying to shoehorn it into a business model based almost solely on an ideological belief - which obviously doesn't work for such things - which is why we hit on the idea of Medicaid in the first fuckin' place.

We've tried this All-Things-Privatized before. The whole world has tried this before - it was called Monarchy (aka: Daddy State - in one form or another).

240 years ago, some smart guys figured out that that was a pretty fucked up way to do things if the point of the exercise is to live your life without having to pay rent on the air you breathe, and the water you drink, and the dirt you grow your own food in.

And yet, for reasons passing understanding, the rubes who're always yelling "American Exceptionalism" are the ones enthusiastically buying into the plan to take us back to Government-By-Class-Based-Economic-System, to which the US was founded to be the fucking exception.

The Gorsuch Appointment

Even if I could agree with what Judge Gorsuch is likely to hand down, I think I'd still have to be opposed just because he's a Rich-Boy Legacy Puke who started climbing the ladder fifteen rungs above everybody else.

Handing things off to the next generation is one thing, but enough with this American Aristocracy shit.

Vox:

Donald Trump has selected Neil Gorsuch, a 49-year-old federal appeals court judge on the 10th Circuit, as his choice to fill the late Justice Antonin Scalia’s seat on the Supreme Court.

Gorsuch is a widely acclaimed jurist, a favorite of conservatives and libertarians but also very respected by liberal colleagues. He’s exactly the kind of elite, educated figure who's traditionally made it onto the Court. His mother, Anne Gorsuch Burford, was Ronald Reagan's director of the Environmental Protection Agency from 1981 to 1983. A graduate of Columbia (where he was a Truman scholar), Oxford (where he got a doctorate under the acclaimed Catholic legal philosopher John Finnis as a Marshall scholar), and Harvard Law (which five other members of the Court attended), Gorsuch clerked on the DC Circuit and then for both Justices Byron White and Anthony Kennedy before working at a boutique litigation firm in Washington, DC, for 10 years and doing a brief stint in the George W. Bush Justice Department.

So it’s perhaps not surprising that when Bush appointed to him to the 10th Circuit — which covers much of the Mountain West, including Gorsuch's home state of Colorado — at the age of 38, he was easily confirmed by voice vote.

This time should be different. Gorsuch is more outspoken and forthright in his positions than your typical Supreme Court aspirant, providing a lot of fodder for any opponents. A Democratic filibuster motivated by Republicans’ successful obstruction of President Obama’s nominee, Merrick Garland, for this same seat last year is a certainty for any nominee, and if Democrats conclude that Gorsuch’s views on issues like the right to life and religious liberty are outside the mainstream, the filibuster might have a chance of success.

Compare And Contrast

Tomorrow, on the day we commemorate the beginning of our experiment in self-government, it may be of some value to look at where we started, and try to gauge the probabilities of where we may be headed.

Here's the bedroom of King George III as it is supposed to have looked in the 18th century:

And now, the bedroom of a certain Populist "Billionaire", masquerading as a champion of the American Workin' Guy:

Questions? 

What's Wrong Here?

Steven Rosenfeld interviewing David Cay Johnston over at AlterNet:

“Imagine that you are a mortgage lender. Are you going to lend people money for 30 years if they don’t have the security of employment?” Johnston said, offering an example of how the successful push by the technology sector to undermine and overturn the labor laws created during the New Deal are tilting too far toward piecemeal purveyors and will create new instability.

“People are working without salary, benefits, and the stability to buy a house and raise a family,” he said, saying that the blame can be placed at the foot of high-tech lobbyists who have donated to congressional campaigns and federal officeholders who subsequently loosened federal laws to their benefit.

Meanwhile, according to Pew’s New Digital Economy report, 61 percent of Americans have never heard of “crowdfunding,” 73 percent are not familiar with the “sharing economy,” and 89 percent have never heard of the “gig economy.”

The big picture painted by Johnston, who is a registered Republican but schooled in the belief that business prospers when wages and benefits are reliable and income is spent locally, was the fundamentals of middle-class stability are being further eroded by a new technology-based oligarchy. Despite all the hip apps and marketing, gig economy profits are only going to executives while the jobs offered are intrinsically unstable, fiscally unpredictable and most of the risk and expense are placed on contract workers.

 But not to worry, Oligarchs - the great American Intellect Deficit is forever on your side:

Meanwhile, according to Pew’s New Digital Economy report, 61 percent of Americans have never heard of “crowdfunding,” 73 percent are not familiar with the “sharing economy,” and 89 percent have never heard of the “gig economy.”

 

It Ain't Broke

Ordinarily, I'd ask - why don't all those clear-eyed pragmatic capitalists understand this and do something about it?

I'm not asking that anymore because I think they do understand it; they've done pretty much what they intended to do; and it's working pretty much as they intended it to work.  So this is not some software bug.  It's not a glitch.  It's a feature.

This is what Unfettered Free-Market Capitalism ends up looking like.  When you reduce everything to a simple transaction; when every decision is based almost solely on Risk/Reward/Penalty, then you've removed the ethical dividing line between Right and Wrong - they become interchangeable - and suddenly those aren't people any more; they're revenue opportunities.

Seems like we've been here before.

  

Think Of Something Better

And that kinda goes with a piece at WaPo:

The U.S. suicide rate has increased sharply since the turn of the century, led by an even greater rise among middle-aged white people, particularly women, according to federal data released Friday.

Last decade’s severe recession, more drug addiction, “gray divorce,” increased social isolation, and even the rise of the Internet and social media may have contributed to the growth in suicide, according to a variety of people who study the issue.

But economic distress — and dashed hopes generally — may underpin some of the increase, particularly for middle-aged white people. The data showed a 1 percent annual increase in suicide between 1999 and 2006 but a 2 percent yearly hike after that, as the economy deteriorated, unemployment skyrocketed and millions lost their homes.

“People [were] growing up with a certain expectation . . . and the Great Recession and other things have really changed that,” said Julie A. Phillips, a professor of sociology at Rutgers University who studies the demography of suicide. “Things aren’t panning out the way people expect. I feel for sure that has had an effect.”

Today's Quote

Nothing is so hard for those who abound in riches as to conceive how others can be in want. — Jonathan Swift

And just to move things along, we need to be able to think about these issues beyond the sentiments of the quotes and the bumper stickers and the memes.

We can fill our heads with righteous indignation when "conservatives" spout the usual blaming bullshit about the "Professionally Poor", and we should be pissed about that, but we should be pissed about that because it's a tactic of deflection - it puts us in a position that makes us look like we're defending "waste fraud and abuse", which legitimizes an almost-totally illegitimate argument.

Waste Fraud and Abuse accounts for about .001% of total expenditure (not that we know with any precision cuz - you know, people need to hide that shit).  Anyway, it goes up some - sometimes getting as high as 1 whole percent on individual programs - but it's nothing near what "conservatives" love to fantasize about.  But that still means you're defending against a phantom threat.  Stop doing that. 

And don't get bogged down when they shift to The Tyranny Of Large Numbers crap either.  Yes, 1 or 2 percent of a humungous number is still a very large number - until you divide that very large number by that other very large number - poor people who just need a little fucking help, asshole. You're gonna get all bent outa shape because some guy scraped an extra 82 bucks out of the system's gutter just so his kids had a decent breakfast once in a while? Well ain't you just chock full of the spirit of Christian love and charity.

But that's not the point either.  The point is that when we're on the defensive like that, we miss the opportunity to point out that Waste Fraud and Abuse is what the big guys have built into the system to benefit themselves; and what the small-to-medium sized guys can take advantage of as well (so they can feel smart too), while they're all soaking up the tax dollars intended to help people who actually need the help. And here's the kicker on that part: these jokers are happy to throw a few crumbs at the poor because they can use that tiny bit of tax money to fuel the judgmental hypocrisy of Wingnut Autocrats and their army of Orcs rubes. 

Waste Fraud and Abuse is what happens when Archer Daniels Midland puts half-a-billion tax dollars in its pocket, and then hides behind a human shield that Coin-Operated Congress Critters get paid handsomely to refer to as Moochers or Welfare Queens.

These people have no soul and no honor. Stop helping them.

Towards The Meritocracy

I have nothing against some good and healthy Intergenerational Wealth Transfer - it's an important tool in building strong communities.  And it's worked wonders for everybody who's been born into White Middle Class America because of course, our system is the perfect mechanism for separating the people who're smart and rich from the people who're lazy and stupid.

To paraphrase: Capitalism has not failed us; you have failed Capitalism.

But "good and healthy" is not what we're doing with the No-Taxes-For-Rich-People-Ever policy drift, and it should be really obvious that it's not what we're doing, now that we've been trying to do it that way for 35 years (rapidly accelerating for the last 15), and we've ended up having to spend billions of precious few tax dollars to subsidize millions of Americans who can't quite make it working their asses off at Wal-Mart just because we refuse to elect politicians who have the balls to tell Alice Walton she'll have to figure how to eke out a living on something less than the interest she "earns" on her personal fortune of more than THIRTY-FUCKING-BILLION-DOLLARS.

Tax the fuck outa the estates of the UberRich and we won't get any more Legacy-Fuck-Pukes like George W Bush as "president". 

Call it the Paris Hilton Prevention Act, and make sure it never sunsets.

The Big Bamboozle

Everybody loves to hate Wal-Mart.

I think ya gotta be careful with the whole 2-Minute Daily Hate thing, but there's something pretty satisfying about it once in a while. Especially when you can point it in the right direction.

Haves And Soon-To-Haves

Try not to think about Logan's Run or The Island or Roller Ball or whatever.

To Be Clear

The income for the "average" American family in 2010 was less than $46,000.  That year, Willard and Ann Romney claimed a deduction of $77,000 on their tax return for expenses related to their horse hobby of Dressage.

I don't really care what these Silver-Spoon Legacy Fucks do with their disposable income or their spare time.  But I have a major problem with all of it when the system is rigged so that I'm forced to subsidize that kinda shit.

Communist My Ass

Mr Jefferson said some things that get clearer and wiser the more I revisit them.

"Every generation needs a new revolution."

-and-

"The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of tyrants and patriots."

We hear a lot about how China is this big and powerful and scary thing.  We also hear lots of criticism of China's "Communist System" and how these dirty commies may be doin' great capitalistic things, but they're still just a buncha dirty commies blah blah blah - well, they aren't really.  At least not completely.  Not when there's a story about the grandson of one of China's old guard Party People, who's been hangin' like a rock star as he matriculates at Harvard, cuz suddenly it's kinda hard for me not to see it as another example of the amazing resilience of the very human propensity towards aristocracy.

From NYT:

One Chinese friend of mine was a judge in corruption cases, and made a good living taking bribes from defendants. Another friend, the son of a Politburo member, was paid several hundred thousand dollars a year simply to lend his name to a real estate company.

Officials have a maddening sense of entitlement. When I lived in China, my wife and I once attended a party with many middle-age officials (including one now in the Politburo) and a crowd of trophy female secretaries. One cabinet minister mistook my wife, who is Chinese-American, for a secretary and crassly made moves on her. Let’s just say that my wife ruined his evening.

The scale of corruption has become mind-boggling. Zhang Shuguang, a railways official,managed to steal $2.8 billion and move it overseas, the state news media have reported. A Chinese central bank report suggested that 18,000 corrupt officials had fled China and taken $120 billion with them. The average take was almost $7 million per person.

The backdrop is the staggering wealth enjoyed by the elite. More than 300 million Chinese lack access to safe water, but one tycoon’s home I visited had an indoor basketball court, a movie theater and a pond with rare fish worth up to tens of thousands of dollars each.

In Chinese, the words for power (“quan”) and money (“qian”) sound alike, and in China one often translates into another.